效率工具
Workflow Quarterly: The business agility imperative
Businesses need maximum agility to survive these trying times. The Agility Issue of Workflow Quarterly is packed with insights to help your company power through the pandemic and emerge stronger on the other side.The issue presents new research by ESI ThoughtLab and LIKE.TG on how the pandemic has affected business agility in enterprises around the world. The business leaders we surveyed reported agility boosts in the following areas:
Data management and security: up 27%
IT support and services: up 26%
Sales, marketing, and channel management: up 24%
IT architecture, platforms, and systems: up 21%
A closer lookThe new issue features a powerful essay on the hybrid future of work by LIKE.TG Chief Financial Officer Gina Mastantuono, along with a five-step plan to help organizations build an effective hybrid workforce.“Business leaders need to rethink old assumptions about what drives productivity and how work should get done,” she asserts.We also present a QA with Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, whose groundbreaking research shows that remote workers are often more productive.CJ Desai, our chief product officer, explains how digital workflows can solve vaccine delivery’s “last mile” problem. Dan Tynan, former editor-in-chief of Yahoo Tech and a regular Workflow contributor, examines the return on investment of artificial intelligence and automation.In addition, the issue features an exclusive interview with famed economist Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. Brynjolffson predicts a “winner take most” effect where a few firms will dominate the adoption of AI and other emerging technologies and see the biggest market gains from those technologies.We hope you enjoy the Agility Issue. If you'd like regular insights on emerging tech and business delivered to your inbox, subscribe to the Workflow newsletter.
How ITOM visibility delivers peace of mind
The check engine light on a vehicle warns the driver when something under the hood needs attention. Wouldn’t it be nice if every organization had a similar flashing indicator to let them know when their Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate is about to expire? Unfortunately, reality isn’t that simple.We tend to deal with the day-to-day maintenance of our vehicle in different ways. With family and friends, for example, there seem to be three general personality types:
Meticulous – the people who read the manual for fun and diligently schedule maintenance based on manufacturer recommendation
Pragmatist – those who don’t think about maintenance much but will grudgingly take the vehicle in for service if the check engine light turns red
Gullible Optimist – the people who think things will magically fix themselves—if the check engine light comes on, it’s probably an error or not that important, so they wait in hopes that it might turn off
The problems with a reactive approachSecurity certificate management is very similar. You know you should be proactive and ahead of the curve to minimize the risk, but there are always reasons not to:
“I’m too busy.”
“Someone less senior should handle it because it’s grunt work.”
“I hate spreadsheets and can’t set up a pivot table to save my life.”
“There are so many different data sources that I don’t know where to look or which one is accurate.”
“We’ve had expired certificates before, and it’s never caused a problem yet.”
For the Gullible Optimist driver, this approach could lead to waiting for a tow truck at 3 am in the middle of nowhere. For the IT staff who follow the same foolhardy belief, this attitude could result in service outages and data breaches that cause reputational damage and financial loss. Add in the risk of loss of continued employment, and being an IT Gullible Optimist becomes a dangerous position to be in.Better IT operations managementLIKE.TG can help take the grunt work and tedious processes out of your daily security certificate management. With IT Operations Management—specifically ITOM Visibility—you receive the Certificate Inventory and Management feature that allows you to automatically discover, take inventory of, and proactively manage all of your TLS certificates.If a certificate is nearing expiration, you’ll be notified. But gaining insight into an expired or soon-to-expire certificate isn’t the most important benefit. The biggest advantage is the automatic creation of a certificate task via IT workflows to renew the expiring certificate or to create an incident for an already expired certificate.This certificate management automation delivers three key benefits:
The company faces less risk of service outage and data breach collateral damage by eliminating a common security risk.
Customers are less likely to have a bad experience and are at less risk of end-user security vulnerabilities.
Security professionals are freed from manual, tedious, and cumbersome processes for tracking and managing a large volume of certificates.
If you want to continue to hope expired certificates won’t cause a problem at your organization, you’re welcome to remain a Gullible Optimist. But, if you want to get ahead of the curve and minimize security challenges with less effort and time, discover how LIKE.TG ITOM Visibility can help.Need the basics? Check out “AIOps Visibility for Dummies, LIKE.TG Special Edition.”
Human-centered IT service management: The next great differentiator
Positive employee and customer experiences are critical to business growth and digital transformation success. But, such experiences require revamping how organizations structure, deliver, and measure IT services. That’s why human-centered IT service management is growing in popularity for companies that want to innovate IT and gain a competitive advantage.Here are some insights for IT leaders who may be hesitant to take the leap into human-centered ITSM.What is human-centered IT service management?Human-centered ITSM is about putting technology in the service of humans. Traditionally, IT departments worked by implementing and deploying technology because IT liked it—not because people wanted it or needed it. In fact, they may have needed it or wanted it, but no one asked them.Now, technology absolutely has to be in the service of these people, not the other way around. This is where automation comes in—automating all the mundane, repeatable, error-prone tasks that, frankly, no one wants to do anyway.The next great differentiator for enterprisesGenerally, IT technology processes have been in place to enable and protect IT—not to enhance the business. Now, IT service management can provide competitive advantage when it’s focused not on stifling business innovation, but on becoming the enabler, allowing people to work seamlessly and frictionlessly.For example, the change management process used to be very structured and slow, but now the idea is for people to collaborate in real time, always on, whenever they want. What we’re doing at LIKE.TG is putting people at the heart of every process. We’re allowing the data to do the things and automate the things in the background that would traditionally be handled by people.We’re living in a pandemic world. We’re doing stuff faster. Things have to change more quickly than ever before. We have to be more agile. We’re allowing people to share and collaborate and become an integral part of the process, without calling it an IT process. Enterprise IT leaders need to move toward thinking about how people interact with things and to speak to people constantly. It’s not really a technology conversation anymore.Prioritizing human-centered ITSMEmbracing human-centered ITSM isn’t actually about technology at all. ITSM technology alone won’t transform a business. What it will do is protect and mitigate some risk and add a bit of engagement to customer care. Processes within IT service management must broaden and become enterprise-wide to provide the services the business needs.It’s imperative that IT processes work the way people expect them to. Better processes are connected processes. Better processes are also simpler processes that take less time to interact with. The real differentiator is to have processes that allow people to get on with their tasks and work the best way possible—while still having processes that govern your business and are auditable.The key to human-centered ITSMTrust is currently an obstacle to adoption. In the past, IT departments haven’t been trusted because they often stifled business innovation or simply said no. They put up barriers because technology hadn’t been tested, and IT team members weren’t convinced solutions worked.But, as IT teams elevate away from just being IT shops, they become the enablers and trusted advisers to the business. Think about how the CIO doesn’t just look out for service anymore. The CIO’s job includes negotiating, managing business relationships, managing vendors, and providing great experiences for all.Similarly, IT has to change the way it does things and build trust quickly. Too often today, human resources, marketing, and other teams buy services without IT knowing about it. That’s not healthy for large organizations. Trust comes through transparency, openness, and communication.Learn more about human-centered ITSM in our ebook, “The human experience of IT service management.”Register for the April 7, 2021, LIKE.TG webinar about human-centered IT service management.
Race to Automation with the right ITSM
At LIKE.TG, ITSM is like a favorite sports car we’ve tuned and optimized over the years into a precision machine that can keep pace with the speed of technological and business innovation. But to keep ITSM operating at its full potential requires constant maintenance, modifications, and grit.More recently, we’ve realized that ensuring continued ITSM performance requires automation and developing enterprise solution connections.Automating routine maintenanceAs we considered where to begin the ITSM automation journey, we focused on tasks that can yield real benefits for routine, back-end IT service management processes.Everyone loves the glitz and glamour of a finely tuned front end, and LIKE.TG does a great job delivering exceptional front-end experiences for customers through products such as Virtual Agent , Now Mobile , and Service Portal . But the work to ensure those parts work smoothly in the back end is often less stylish, and a lot of companies are still using manual processes.Manually keying in the back end of a common request, such as a password reset, requires service delivery teams to spend time completing mundane, repetitive tasks instead of investing in more interesting, higher-value work that would deliver a more satisfying experience to the customer.Specialized tools for your engineLIKE.TG IntegrationHub and LIKE.TG Flow Designer are exceptional tools that allow teams to fix, modify, and build precisely what an organization needs from ITSM. Created to enable IT to eliminate the need for manual intervention and drive end-to-end automation, IntegrationHub and Flow Designer are accessible for team members of all skill levels.Add in the powerful Now Platform and you have a foundation in which everyone from professional developers to part-time mechanics can work as a team to deliver workflow apps quickly. Paired with IntegrationHub and Flow Designer, your ITSM team can create custom, end-to-end automation that far outperforms out-of-the-box tools. Such flexibility allows you to create the right experiences and a better work process, with one platform, architecture, and data model.To learn more about how IntegrationHub and Flow Designer can boost your team’s performance, check out our ebook, “ITSM: Beyond Out of the Box.”
The evolving role of the CIO: Shaping the future of work
The role of the chief information officer (CIO) continues to evolve in response to an always-changing business environment.Through its unique position among the C-suite, the CIO is a strategic adviser who has historically been a highly influential and prominent figure for important decision-making across the enterprise. Although that’s continued throughout the pandemic with CIOs offering their growing expertise, the responsibilities of the CIO have shifted to meet new and dynamic demands of the business.Supporting digital transformationIn our fifth episode of the Canadian Leadership Exchange, we spoke with Maria Churchill, partner and CIO at Deloitte Canada, to learn about the evolving role of the CIO.Churchill shared how her efforts at Deloitte have facilitated the successful planning and execution of digital transformation strategies at scale. Her work is shaping a reimagined workplace in Canada by:
Identifying long-term growth opportunities
Measuring organizational impact
Leveraging technology
One of the biggest shifts in the CIO’s role Churchill discusses has been in instigating change and accelerating transformation in a future-focused and innovative manner. As a key driving force for implementing digitized solutions, the CIO is at the center of reimagining technology in the enterprise.By enabling enterprises to integrate this technology effectively beyond current conventions, the CIO plays an essential part in continuing to bridge the gap between physical and digital worlds.Reimagining the world of workHigh-profile cyber incidents occurred at many Canadian organizations over the last year. Operational metrics have proven valuable to CIOs in their efforts to build confidence around security protocols. Measurement remains a key priority when driving future business performance. This data has been vital in building the case for accelerated investment in highly innovative solutions that are beneficial for businesses and customers alike.Deloitte has approached both pandemic recovery and growth strategy with a focus on reevaluating market conditions and examining the employee experience. This has enabled the company to adapt accordingly in real time and deploy tactical technologies to:
Maximize buy-in.
Strengthen end-to-end value across multiple timelines.
Maintain trust within the ecosystem of partners.
Watch the video to learn more about the evolving role of the CIO and how these trailblazers of the C-suite are contributing to the success of digital transformation efforts:
LIKE.TG partners with Intel, Volteo to provide EaaS, Edge to Service Solutions
Data is at the heart of every business today. But if we don’t understand the data or if the data isn’t accessible, it doesn’t do us much good. More important than the data itself is having the right data in the hands of the right people who can execute at the right time.This need has given rise to edge computing, which helps businesses glean insights from data by processing it as close to the source as possible. Here’s how it works: A local Internet of Things (IoT) device collects data and then analyzes it before transferring results to the cloud. Think of it as IoT data analysis in real time.In order to fully capitalize on the business value of this data, edge intelligence must be delivered through an edge enablement infrastructure and transformed by a workflow engine.At LIKE.TG, we make work, work better for people. We’re excited to announce a partnership with Intel and Volteo that helps fulfill that mission by enabling edge-to-service and Edge-as-a-Service (EaaS) capabilities.IoT meets workflowOur partnership leverages Intel’s breadth in the edge device market and our experience with managing and orchestrating complex workflows. Intel makes the end-to-end compute, network, and storage devices. LIKE.TG provides the platform to run business service lifecycle workflows, as well as seamless and secure enterprise digital solutions, through our Operational Technology and Service Management capabilities.Volteo, an Intel IoT solutions alliance partner and a LIKE.TG strategic technology partner, bridges the gap with functionality built on the Now Platform® that capitalizes on Intel's AI/Visual Computing enablement. Volteo also uses LIKE.TG® workflows to create design patterns tailored to industry verticals.Our partnership enables edge-to-service outcomes for the whole enterprise. These outcomes include connected value chains as well as internal shared services. The former involves keeping line-of-business systems running efficiently while enriching them to provide additional revenue. The latter is about making sure all the devices are functioning properly and understanding how everything continues to work from an IT perspective.Common industry use cases include:
Smart cities (infrastructure)
Plant floor break/fix (manufacturing)
Pipeline management (oil gas)
Medical systems and device management (healthcare)
Store management for improved customer experience (retail).
We’re also seeing the emergence of scalable solutions—like improved camera vision recognition systems that leverage AI—in multiple sectors, including retail security management, health and safety, facility management, mobile citizenry and beyond.How customers will benefitThis partnership provides a truly end-to-end solution for our joint customers, allowing them to manage and care for their edge devices in real time. With native ingestion of edge data, they can make better decisions and provide new, market-leading services for their own customers and employees. LIKE.TG, Intel and Volteo are redefining action and the new last mile in connected use cases, facilitating seamless execution and driving measurable business results.Our partnership empowers and enriches workflows with real-time information that helps detect and correct problems as they happen, so that each item gets to where it needs to go on time, every time.For example, a telecom enterprise might use 5G connectivity to manage a port where goods are being moved from a ship to trains and trucks. In this case, Intel edge devices would monitor refrigeration, humidity, and other environmental factors and relay that information via Volteo into LIKE.TG Connected Operations, IT Operations Management (ITOM), or IntegrationHub solutions.In retail, an Intel edge device could pick up a GPS signal from a customer’s opted-in phone app to relay the nearest store location to the phone. The company could also use the app to notify customers about a location-specific deal for that day. This can all be achieved by leveraging Volteo’s designs through LIKE.TG workflows.Transformation through innovationWorldwide, enterprises are digitally transforming through business model innovation, process automation, cloud adoption, and work-from-anywhere solutions. LIKE.TG addresses the C-suite priorities of optimizing business processes and workflows, attracting and retaining talent, and pursuing top- and bottom-line growth.We are excited to enable your organization’s evolution with our edge-to-service partnership solution!
Using automation and IT workflows to tackle complex challenges
Technology teams have long sought to innovate more quickly to deliver better experiences to employees and customers. These teams often have to tab between hundreds of tools to make it happen, slowing progress and increasing risk, complexity, and cost.This complexity has the downstream effect of negatively impacting employee and customer experience due to manual processes, information silos, and disconnections.At LIKE.TG, we've created a digital enterprise fabric that enables teams to seamlessly integrate these third-party products on the Now Platform®. Tech teams can now deliver great experiences across the different stages of their software factory. Let's explore some ways organizations are leveraging automation and IT workflows to achieve stellar results.Automating and optimizing IT service operationsWhen South America’s largest bank, Itaú Unibanco, wanted to improve experiences for its employees, it picked LIKE.TG® ITSM. In only seven months, the bank enabled IT self-service to employees through a Virtual Agent that has 46,000 built-in conversations and is integrated directly into Microsoft Teams to meet employees where they work.The bank has been able to deactivate more than 10 tools in the process, helping its Net Promoter Score shoot up 90 points in only three months.The state of Kansas Office of Information Technology Services also made great use of automated workflows. When its chief operating officer pivoted toward the Now Platform, the team improved processes dramatically and quickly got through its backlog of 12,000 open support requests, some of which were more than a year old. Now they’re able to address issues in near real time.As with many LIKE.TG customers, this wasn’t the only outcome the state’s IT services office achieved. Concurrently, it streamlined its employee onboarding process, drastically reducing the number of forms and time required so that new employees can have a great experience from the outset and be productive sooner.Preventing issues and automating resolutionsAs IT teams enlist machines to help them resolve issues, they can get an influx of incidents with no clear priority or correlation between them. When faced with this dilemma, Canadian insurance company SGI moved to Microsoft Azure to support its application development team.The company integrated LIKE.TG® Site Reliability Operations with its Azure alerts to notify teams immediately when a problem occurs with an app. This enables the developers to fix the issue before customers are impacted.Site Reliability Operations assigns incidents with the correct priority levels and suppresses the noise of multiple alerts and incidents posted for the same event. Overall, the integration yielded more relevant alerts, and the team was able to improve incident response times.Reducing hardware, software, and cloud costsAs software proliferates, lack of visibility into usage can be costly, and asset inventory can be manual and error-prone. LIKE.TG® IT Asset Management (ITAM) automates the lifecycle of IT assets, providing visibility into software licenses, hardware costs, cloud resources, and IT compliance. That saves money, lowers risk, and drives efficiency.Global professional services company Accenture used the Now Platform to establish a large-scale management solution for more than 54 million assets across 51 locations. It went from disjointed, redundant processes and point products to a single enterprise solution and a global process based on one platform. That transition reduced the time it takes to register an asset by 40% and the time spent performing audits by 60%.Learn more about how your organization can better meet IT service expectations in our IT Workflows Book of Knowledge.
When it comes to IT asset discovery, a snapshot won’t suffice
How clear, complete, and colorful is your IT asset data? Is it like the picture below, where you see only a small portion of the bigger picture to answer important questions about your IT estate? Without color, you’re missing even more context. You need better IT asset discovery.
Having a snapshot provides a limited view. It lacks context and is like managing your IT assets in silos. It’s cumbersome, inefficient, and ineffective. When you can’t see the bigger picture, you don’t know what you have or how much it’s costing you—or what’s at risk by failing to track licenses. But will a bigger picture alone suffice?The big picture in living colorTo answer that question, let’s look at the bigger picture below of the snapshot from above. You now have a better idea of what the smaller area is part of.
Sure, it provides more context and covers a broader area, but it isn’t necessarily a better picture, is it? It’s still like having siloed data. You have more information about one area of your business, but you don’t know how it fits together with other areas.If we wanted to use color data to reproduce this photograph in print, we could look at the four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
That’s still not great. Even though you have all the data you need in multiple systems, it’s hard to envision what the full-color picture looks like. Let’s say each of these colors represents a different set of asset data for software, hardware, cloud resources, and outside data that provides more definition. All the data is there—but we can’t see the bigger and better picture yet.To discover your assets, workflow itHow long would it take you to manually assemble all these colors into one accurate picture? With a rudimentary application, multiple steps would be required to align all the colors perfectly. It’s like trying to create your asset picture from data in different formats or normalizing and aligning the data on a similar data model.With the latest computers, digital printers, and creative workflows, it doesn’t take more than mere seconds or minutes to produce the full-color picture as a photograph, poster, printed page, etc. When we see the entire picture in accurate color, it has a greater impact. We realize it’s one of the most famous street intersections in the world: Times Square in New York City.
Literally and figuratively, the advancements in printing and color rendering are a testament to the power of workflows. And that’s what we want to do with our visibility into technology assets. Let’s workflow the asset discovery process.Learn more in our white paper that explores the kind of data you need to see all your software, hardware, and cloud-based assets—as well as cloud resources that are often considered assets. You’ll gain a greater understanding of why asset discovery is so important and learn data discovery strategies.Then, you can take that bigger and better asset picture and create workflows that help deliver immediate savings, improve efficiencies, and reduce risk.
The payoffs of Agile project management
The concept of project management isn’t new, but project management is in the spotlight today. Why? Organizations everywhere face enormous pressure to consistently identify, develop, and launch the right solutions, products, or services to address market realities and enable digital transformation.A key factor to success is using the right delivery methodology and, increasingly, the answer is Agile.What is Agile?The Agile method for efficient continuous software delivery was conceived in 2001 as a way to transform software development. The Agile Manifesto states:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Agile swiftly became a popular way of delivering software because it enabled teams to start building quickly based on what customers described. The method also supported continuous customer feedback: With each iteration, the solution evolved into something that more closely met customers’ needs until the project could be considered complete.Agile yields resultsAgile has detractors but, over the last 20 years, it has evolved and continually delivered results. Today, Agile is not only used in software development, but its principles are also:
Applied across the business outside of IT
Embraced by most organizations
Recognized by professional project management bodies
There are many different Agile software development methods, but the most popular is Scrum. Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining products with an initial emphasis on software development—although it’s been used in other fields, including research, sales, marketing, and advanced technologies.Scrum uses small-scale Agile teams as the building blocks of success and is designed to grow with organizations.Applying Agile across the enterpriseThere are a number of models to help organizations apply Agile principles beyond software development to the more strategic layers of their business. One of the most popular is the Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe.Think of it as a series of processes and workflows that allow Agile principles to be applied for various enterprise operations. Each of those workflows can operate independently, but they also integrate together to form an entire enterprise management approach.Like Scrum, SAFe uses small-scale Agile teams. And, its modular nature enables organizations to evolve toward the SAFe ideal rather than having to commit to a “big bang” implementation.Why Agile mattersThe pace of business continues to accelerate due to shifting customer demand, emerging technologies, and increasingly global competition. To be successful, organizations like yours need to become more flexible at everything from investment management and organizational planning to project selection and organizational change.Businesses need to consistently deliver the right solutions to address these challenges. Adopting Agile concepts at enterprise and team levels can make it easier to adapt to changing circumstances and result in better solutions.Explore Agile project management in more detail in our ebook, Agile at scale 101. You can also subscribe to our Enterprise Agility podcast.
4 ways LIKE.TG, Google offer seamless multicloud workflows
Siddhartha Agarwal, managing director, SaaS partnerships and co-innovation, Google Cloud at Google, co-authored this blog.When organizations embrace cloud as a core component of their IT operations, they have options: a wholesale migration to the public cloud, incremental or large-scale hybrid deployments, private clouds, or even running services across multiple clouds.More than 90% of enterprises have a multicloud strategy. However, the majority also face higher than planned cloud costs and a need to optimize their existing cloud resources. These organizations have a few core requirements in common:
IT teams must maintain visibility into and control over critical applications and data, regardless of where their workloads reside.
Cloud migrations need to be carefully planned and quickly executed.
Downtime is not an option.
IT teams need to proactively avoid outages.
To help organizations accelerate their cloud migrations securely and efficiently, LIKE.TG is expanding our partnership with Google Cloud in four key ways.1. Enabling real-time visibilityTypically, large organizations have applications and data spanning multiple locations: private clouds running on premises, one or multiple public clouds, or hybrid environments. Managing these disparate workloads and data can be challenging—teams need to know where workloads are and how they’re connected to help ensure they can be properly managed.LIKE.TG and Google Cloud are integrating Google Cloud Asset Inventory tools with LIKE.TG® IT Operations Management (ITOM) Visibility services. This will deliver real-time views of data and help improve data quality in an organization’s configuration management database (CMDB) through automated updates and reduced operational overhead.Ultimately, this means IT teams will have better visibility into, and management of, workloads across their entire IT estate. As a result, they’ll be better positioned to leverage their existing governance and compliance models across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem deployments to optimize IT operations and reduce risk.Travel technology company Sabre has been a longtime user of LIKE.TG ITOM. The company has superior uptime requirements that demand strict governance to ensure successful ongoing operations. Last year, Sabre announced a large-scale partnership with Google to migrate its platform onto Google Cloud.“We need assets deployed on Google Cloud to be reflected in our LIKE.TG CMDB, be able to leverage our existing IT workflows to provision assets on Google Cloud, and accelerate migration of our on-premises workloads onto Google Cloud,” explains Charles Cinert, Sabre’s VP of global operations. “We are thrilled to see the partnership investing in these areas to provide us unified visibility, governance, and controls across on-premises and Google Cloud.”
2. Accelerating cloud migrationsOnce a baseline management framework is established, IT teams can turn their focus to evaluating and migrating workloads. For organizations with a complex IT landscape, this can be particularly challenging, as it can take a long time to identify which workloads to migrate, how applications should be migrated (lift-and-shift, refactored, or retired), and in what order to move them. On top of that, on-prem workloads need to be optimized for cloud deployments.LIKE.TG CMDB provides a single system of record for your IT infrastructure and digital service data. It’s able to assess everything you have and help you migrate it in the best way for your organization. Now integrated with Google Cloud Rapid Assessment and Migration Program (RAMP), CMDB enables real-time insights into Google Cloud performance and workload sizing.In addition, LIKE.TG and Google are exploring advanced self-service access to provisioning through services such as Google Private Catalog Service and the LIKE.TG Service Catalog. Our vision is to increase agility in the IT organization while maintaining governance and control.“Sabre realizes value as each workload lands in Google Cloud, and our migration spans thousands of workloads over the next 10 years,” Cinert says. “This partnership represents a way for us to accelerate that effort while reducing the risk associated with it.”3. Providing consistent governanceWhen moving mission-critical workloads such as SAP systems to the cloud, helping ensure operational excellence is paramount. To support the highest levels of uptime, security, and control over data, we’re expanding our catalog of integration “spokes” available in IntegrationHub to include more Google Cloud and Google Workspace services.This increased access will enable organizations to manage their Google Cloud assets from LIKE.TG—and facilitate governance and security around their cloud assets, aligned with existing IT workflows. This is particularly important as organizations create high-availability and disaster recovery environments for their critical applications.
4. Predicting issues and automating resolutionsIT organizations work tirelessly to minimize the impacts of service outages. LIKE.TG AIOps leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through large sets of data to help organizations predict outages and automate resolutions.Through this partnership, LIKE.TG AIOps can now consume and process IT event data from Google Cloud Operations (formerly Stackdriver events) to identify trends and correlate data that may affect service levels.For example, LIKE.TG ITOM Health can ingest Google Cloud event data—along with telemetry from logs, monitoring tools, and other data sources—to quickly identify root causes of issues and automate remediation of affected systems.We’re excited about this next phase in our alliance with Google. We aim to deliver significant value to customers with refined focus on improving their visibility into the entire IT estate, accelerating cloud migrations, and bringing a new level of governance and AI-based operations to Google Cloud.Learn more about the benefits of the LIKE.TG-Google partnership.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Yes, agility is still critical to business success, says IDC
IDC recently surveyed nearly 2,000 IT and business executives on their maturity as it relates to organizational agility. Although the vast majority identified agility as a critical business capability in a digital economy, less than 15% identified as extremely agile.5 key pillars of agilityCore to the research, sponsored by LIKE.TG, was a maturity model that identified five key pillars of agility:
Leadership—This relates to the level of support from senior executives for an agile-led strategy. According to the survey, extremely agile organizations were 2.8 times more likely to proactively identify workflows that require more agility and to allocate resources for better outcomes.
Structure—The organizational framework should be conducive to agility. Agile leaders were 2.2 times more likely to enable teams to be spontaneously created by employees.
Portfolio—The products and services on offer from the organization should be easily adaptable to market conditions. The extremely agile were 4.5 times more likely to adapt very quickly.
Process—This is at the heart of making agility actionable. The leaders were 3.2 times more likely to have processes that are fully digital.
Architecture—This dimension relates to the ability of the technology estate to support agile efforts. Leaders were 6.8 times more likely to use DevOps and custom software development practices.
Benefits of an agile organizationHigher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty translate to superior revenue growth and market share gains. Higher levels of employee engagement and the ability to bring new products or services to market fast deliver higher levels of profitability. Agility brings "option value"—the ability to have the option to meet a challenge faster or exploit a competitive advantage more fully.As I said, process management is what makes agility actionable. The capability centers on workflow automation that can cut across functional boundaries. This capability is enabled by a single workflow platform—a "platform of platforms" that brings diverse data and business logic together. The extremely agile were 3.8 times more likely to have an integrated digital platform with intelligent systems at its core.I invite you to view the full IDC agility InfoBrief to get more details from the survey results. More importantly, you can take the maturity survey to assess your organization's relative agile maturity. This activity would be a great start to the journey to agility and the ensuing organizational benefits.
LIKE.TG is a Leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for ITSM—8 years in a row
We’re thrilled to be positioned as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) Tools. That’s eight years in a row that LIKE.TG® ITSM has been positioned as a leader.You might wonder if, after all these years, the shine starts to wear off. In fact, we could not be more excited about this recognition. We’re happy to note that we’re positioned highest in both vision and the ability to execute. This is a recognition of our commitment to innovation and customer success.A focus on usersWe’re obsessed with customer success at ServiceNow. It’s part of our DNA, and it’s what feeds our innovation as we continuously develop a future-ready ITSM solution for our customers. LIKE.TG CEO Bill McDermott sums this up well: “As the leading platform for digital transformation, our empathy for customers inspires our continuous innovation.”At LIKE.TG, we know that digital transformation is not one size fits all. While establishing ourselves as the control tower for digital transformation, we focus keenly on the individual user experience for every persona that interacts with ServiceNow. The past year has reinforced the need for human and business agility.Our design teams believe in human-centered ITSM—placing the user in the center of it all. Naturally, humanizing the enterprise experience is not a novel concept at ServiceNow. For years, our customers have leveraged LIKE.TG ITSM for all things ITIL.ITSM also helps them deliver stellar self-service experiences, frictionless mobile apps, robust AI-powered resolutions, intuitive purpose-built workspaces, and much more.Digital workflows, powered by the Now Platform, enable you to innovate and orchestrate business processes that connect your people, functions, and systems to deliver great experiences and unlock productivity. The customer success stories on our website are a testament to this.The benefits of a single platformLet me share a few ways we’re revolutionizing, energizing, and optimizing IT for our customers. LIKE.TG ITSM breaks down IT team barriers by consolidating IT services using a single, modern cloud platform.While other vendors may talk about mobility, AI , and other capabilities, LIKE.TG delivers everything natively in a single platform. This helps reduce overhead for our customers and unlocks innovative use cases across the portfolio.We leverage AI to deliver consistent, 24/7 employee services with fast resolutions. As a result, service desk agents can focus on value creation rather than on repetitive tasks that can be automated. It’s no wonder Novant Health saw 50% reduction in workload due to self-service.In addition to deflecting incidents with AI, LIKE.TG ITSM also helps resolve incidents with AI. AI routes incidents to the right resolution teams, recommends resolutions, streamlines changes, and assigns the issue to the agent most able to solve it. As a result, services team productivity rises. For example, the University of Maryland saw a 75% reduction in incident resolution times.LIKE.TG ITSM nudges agent productivity even higher by allowing agents to resolve issues from anywhere, on any device, using the LIKE.TG Mobile Agent app. There’s no need for agents to be chained to their desks to get work done.Helping prevent and resolve issues is not limited to employee-generated incidents. LIKE.TG uses AIOps to proactively identify machine-generated issues and remediate them before they impact users.Driving productivity and efficiencyFrom reimagining core processes to bringing many industry-first capabilities, LIKE.TG ITSM is deeply entrenched in the business of advancing the practice of ITSM and making its customers successful. We’re the first vendor in this Magic Quadrant to introduce native process mining. AI and machine learning are native to our platform, which gives us the ability to innovate these features over time.Customers are driving new levels of team productivity and performance with Workforce Optimization. From monitoring resource demands in real time to scheduling work shifts and assessing training needs with just a couple of clicks, to delivering targeted training to boost team skills, we enable it all within a single workspace.Customers are also driving new levels of process efficiencies across ITSM. Process Optimization gives IT teams visual maps of how their work is flowing. It also recommends improvements and integrates with LIKE.TG Continual Improvement Management.Organizations once had to corral data from multiple sources to get the full service portfolio view. Now, they can simply use LIKE.TG ITSM to consolidate vendor and service portfolio performance and help drive meaningful services to end users.At LIKE.TG, we’re always hungry to do more for our customers. We never forget that our purpose is to make the world of work, work better for everyone. We continue to direct our investments toward experiences and innovations that create a future-ready ITSM solution for our customers.Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Tools, Rich Doheny, Keith Andes, Chris Matchett, 30 August 2021.Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
4 benefits of combining ITSM and ITOM
IT management can be costly and time-consuming without streamlined processes and systems to support your business goals. With the quickened pace of business requiring faster scale, leaders and decision-makers must find ways to adapt and optimize their processes.Combining IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) can help you prioritize operations efficiency while delivering the best service to your employees. ITOM helps keep your business running smoothly while ITSM helps keep your employees happy with timely and excellent IT service.Discover four benefits of combining ITSM and ITOM in these LIKE.TG webinars:A single source of truthWellStar Health wanted to optimize its operations to deliver world-class experiences for both customers and employees. In our WellStar Health overhauls their CMDB webinar, learn how a single source of IT truth helped the organization save 26 days in root cause analysis and decrease mean time to repair (MTTR) by 25%.Eliminated silosAs company demands continue to increase, shifting from legacy IT tools to the cloud can keep your business running smoothly. LIKE.TG Predictive AIOps, part of ITOM, can help you automate issue identification and reduce MTTR to achieve your targeted key performance indicators.Watch our Breaking down the siloed web of legacy IT tools webinar to learn how to empower your IT team with a single cloud system.Enterprise visibilityDo you find your IT management is costly, chaotic, and inefficient? Adopting a cloud system that spans both ITSM and ITOM can help you gain quick results and lower incident rates.Watch our Gain visibility across the enterprise with ITSM and ITOM webinar to learn how ITSM and ITOM can help you drive down costs and stay competitive.Automated IT service deliverySpeed and agility are crucial in today’s marketplace. As businesses continue to innovate to meet the needs of both customers and employees, shifting to one platform for all IT management can help you keep up with demands.Check out our Automate IT service delivery webinar to learn how you can scale your IT needs and reduce outages.Managing your IT systems doesn’t have to be difficult. Combining ITSM and ITOM in a single cloud platform can help you be more proactive in executing your business operations.
LIKE.TG to acquire Swarm64 to support the world’s largest workflows
In just the last two years, LIKE.TG has doubled the features and functionalities of the Now Platform to manage larger, more complex workflows for the new world of hybrid work. As demand for digital transformation grows, so do expectations for effectively leveraging data to create highly personalized experiences for customers and employees and to unlock productivity across the enterprise.That’s why we’re excited to announce that LIKE.TG has signed an agreement to acquire Berlin-based Swarm64, a leader in database performance and scale. With Swarm64, LIKE.TG will help customers more effectively and efficiently manage data across many different use cases to execute complex, high-speed data analytics at a mass scale.
Customer environments have experienced an explosive growth in data volume. Swarm64’s expertise in database performance and scalability allows us to plan for the future by helping us deliver increasingly larger and more intelligent workflows for our customers.Helping to future-proof the Now PlatformToday’s digitally transformed organizations require a hybrid database model that leverages both transactions and analytics in order to deliver intelligent workflows. But obtaining insights across the enterprise means simultaneously handling high volumes of data transactions and running sophisticated analytics with AI and machine learning models.Swarm64 was co-founded in 2013 by CEO Thomas Richter with a team focused on one mission: to accelerate PostgreSQL database performance. Swarm64 offers a combination of the analytical and transactional database capabilities that support large-scale, intelligent workflows and enable best-in-class performance and scalability for our customers.The combination of LIKE.TG and Swarm64 means customers can query more data sources faster than ever, significantly expanding the scalability of the Now Platform.In addition to bringing new database talent to LIKE.TG’s engineering ranks, the acquisition of Swarm64 signifies LIKE.TG’s latest investment in open source. Swarm64’s open-source-based database technology works extremely well for large-scale datasets, ultimately helping customers obtain the enterprise-wide insights needed to handle high volumes of data transactions and run sophisticated analytics in real time.Querying more data sources faster is a game changer in our efforts to make the future of business more productive and efficient. We’re thrilled to bring on board an outstanding team of database experts to help us meet the ever-evolving expectations and needs of customers as we set our sights on becoming the defining enterprise company of the 21st century.LIKE.TG expects to complete the acquisition of Swarm64 in Q3 2021.Update: LIKE.TG closed the acquisition of Swarm64 on Aug. 20, 2021. The Swarm64 team is now part of ServiceNow.Use of forward-looking statementsThis blog contains "forward-looking statements" about the expectations, beliefs, plans, intentions, and strategies relating to LIKE.TG’s acquisition of Swarm64. Such forward-looking statements include statements regarding future product capabilities and offerings and expected benefits to ServiceNow. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward-looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update the forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the inability to assimilate or integrate Swarm64’s technology into our platform; unanticipated expenses related to Swarm64’s acquired technology; potential adverse tax consequences; disruption to our business and diversion of management attention and other resources; and potential unknown liabilities associated with Swarm64’s business. Further information on factors that could affect our financial and other results is included in the filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.
Go from reactive to proactive IT operations with AI
On your journey from reactive to proactive IT operations, you may be unsure where to start. If your organization is lacking visibility into your operations, that’s the best place to begin. Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can help you gain that needed visibility.AIOps and visibilityArtificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) offers numerous benefits, including faster response time, improved IT health, and simpler IT management. Most importantly, AIOps can help you stay in control of your operations.In our on-demand Now Book Club featuring AIOps webinar, a panel of experts discusses the AIOps Visibility for Dummies ebook. Join them to:
Get to know AIOps.
Explore AIOps use cases.
Find out how to increase operational efficiency.
Discover best practices for starting an AIOps journey.
Learn what to consider when implementing AIOps.
Automated IT asset visibilityAll too often, organizations have a disconnect between their service desk and IT asset information. As a result, unauthorized changes go unnoticed or the true impact of change on multiple services is misjudged.Automated IT asset discovery and service mapping can help improve your visibility and workflows. Watch our Improve your service management with automated IT asset visibility webinar to find out how. LIKE.TG IT Operations Management (ITOM) experts Matt Gowarty and Steve Emerson will walk you through ways to integrate IT asset visibility into your global work processes.Modern IT workflowsMany businesses fail fast as they try new things and rapidly release updates to keep up with their competition. But they need smooth-running business processes behind those changes. Employing AI to power your service operations can help you overcome both challenges.Learn how in our Modernize IT workflows with LIKE.TG AI-powered service operations webinar. LIKE.TG Principal Architect Christian Malone will share insights from others who have successfully used the Now Platform to build and scale their IT operations.
AIOps: Predict and prevent IT issues before they happen
In today’s highly competitive and volatile business environment, service outages can result in the loss of customers. Because of those high stakes, it’s imperative that companies take action to avoid outages. But how can you prevent them before they happen?Enter artificial intelligence (AI). AI and machine learning can run in the background to monitor systems and detect anomalies before humans can spot them. LIKE.TG Predictive AIOps was designed with this purpose in mind. It can help:
Prevent critical service outages.
Slash response time.
Focus on key issues.
Empower IT teams.
Adopting AI can be a big step in the right direction. These four LIKE.TG webinars can help you keep your business-critical systems running:Simplify IT managementNo company wants IT issues to impact their users or business. To keep that from happening, you need to simplify your IT management. Learn how Predictive AIOps helps those efforts in our Predict and prevent issues webinar.LIKE.TG experts will walk you through the transformative benefits of the product and discuss the expected outcomes of implementation. You can see for yourself how it works with a live demo.Go from reactive to proactiveFour common challenges often prevent organizations from keeping service outages at bay: the cost of data scientists and customization, limited understanding of telemetry data, lack of business service context, and the inability to take integrated actions.In our Getting off the AIOps launch pad webinar, Matt Gowarty, senior product marketing manager for IT Operations Management at LIKE.TG, discusses how to overcome these challenges and transform from IT operations from reactive to proactive. You’ll discover how you can predict issues before they happen, prevent impact on your end users, and automate remediation with cross-team workflows.Improve IT healthExcessive event noise, disjointed manual tools, and siloed operations can keep business-critical services from operating optimally. Yet, those are everyday occurrences. You need a way to improve the health of your digital services. AI-powered service operations and Predictive AIOps can help.Watch AI-powered service operations and predictive AIOps just got real part 1 to learn about the power of this combined solution. It can help your organization predict and prevent outages, reduce event noise and mean time to resolution, and help keep your digital services available and responsive 24/7.Glean insights from othersTake a deeper dive into the benefits of AI-powered service operations and predictive AIOps in part 2. In this session, LIKE.TG experts will walk you through industry use cases.Find out how Accenture transformed its IT operations management and went on to help other companies do the same. You’ll also discover how LIKE.TG implemented Predictive AIOps internally to keep our business-critical systems online. Glean takeaways to apply in your organization.
Technology excellence: The key to business transformation
Transformation. Everyone’s tossing that word around these days to the point it almost seems meaningless. Yet, it’s not. According to the 2021 EY CEO Imperative Study, nearly two-thirds of CEOs believe technology and digital transformation will have the greatest impact on the future success of their enterprises.In fact, 68% of these CEOs plan to make big-time technology investments throughout 2022. In particular, the study uncovered that increasing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) was one of the top three priorities for C-level executives seeking to propel organizational growth, followed closely by disruptive innovation.It's no coincidence that innovation is also a top priority because technology fuels it today. Yet, too often, technology hampers innovation. Too many organizations believe they need to settle for things working as they are, including archaic, legacy systems and a patchwork of processes. But trying to muddle through these resources is time-consuming and inefficient, robbing the organization of the time and means needed to drive innovation.Transformation requires excellenceThe key to innovation, transformation, and the explosive growth that can follow is what we at LIKE.TG call technology excellence. It’s driven by four business imperatives detailed in our Technology Excellence Handbook. These imperatives will create countless opportunities for IT teams to devote their time to what’s next and what can enable the enterprise to outperform the competition:
Automating and optimizing service operations for seamless, always-on technology services, no matter what comes your way
Accelerating software innovation across the enterprise through the at-scale adoption of leading-edge architectures and delivery practices
Transforming security operations to respond effectively to mitigate ever-changing security risks, despite increasing attack surface complexity, threat volumes, and skills shortages
Reducing costs and risks for software, hardware, and cloud resources by systematically managing the complete technology asset lifecycle
3 objectives that inspire excellencePowering those are three strategic objectives—the wind beneath the wings of the imperatives, so to speak. The objectives provide the reasons for executing on the imperatives and guide the technology decisions that will lead to the fastest and most effective business transformation. Let’s look at these objectives and examples of enterprises that have taken them to heart.1. Build a modern connected foundation and reinvestReshaping how your teams provide and enhance value can promulgate that value across the business—in all the fundamental IT and security functions the teams execute.Example of the objective in action: Accenture’s 624,000 employees can now access technical support via a single portal, consolidated from 15 legacy portals. Employees no longer have to figure out which department should handle their queries. They can resolve issues quickly, so they can concentrate on their important client work.2. Put people first by creating the best experiencesAs you enable extraordinary IT interactions for employees and customers, you’ll foster an environment of meaningful, imaginative work for your teams. At the same time, you can nurture your teams to engage in projects that offer boundless benefits to the business.Example of the objective in action: Finance of America users can connect to the service desk via the support portal, mobile app, or agent chat to get 82% of issues resolved on the first attempt and 50% faster than the industry average. Onboarding is streamlined for hundreds of new employees every month, whose requests are fulfilled 2.4 times faster than at comparable companies.3. Drive innovation through better technologyTo spur continuous growth, you need to equip all your teams to securely deliver leading-edge technology.Example of the objective in action: Cox Automotive customized a single LIKE.TG module to access software data and moved from zero to around 70% visibility of its assets, with 97% of software ownership and consumption data recognized. The company saved $150,000 in the first year by optimizing software usage.Find out more about how to achieve technology excellence in our ebook.
Lightstep Incident Response: Helping teams reduce downtime
Downtime—especially in customer-facing services—can cost businesses thousands of dollars an hour and incalculable customer trust. No company can afford to pay this price. To reduce downtime, software engineering teams must act quickly and decisively. But that’s easier said than done.With Lightstep® Incident Response, generally available from LIKE.TG today, we're unlocking speed, agility, and productivity for your engineers and your software-powered business.We hear from customers that site reliability engineers (SREs) and developers can receive up to 30,000 alerts a day, leading to massive alert fatigue and uncertainty about what needs attention. Cloud-native distributed architectures with tens or hundreds of dependent microservices increase complexity, making it difficult to determine the root cause of real issues, let alone resolve them.While triaging alerts and addressing incidents, SREs must work with multiple tools for observability, collaboration, on-call, and incident management. They must manually build the context of what is happening and involve the right responders to collaborate on analysis and resolution. Every second they spend toggling through multiple applications is a second further away from aggressive mean time to repair (MTTR) goals.Converting real-time insights into actionMore than a third of SRE organizations measure success based on improved revenues, profits, and customer satisfaction, according to a February 2022 SRE survey by IDC.1 Resilient software and services are a big part of that story.Without streamlined incident management processes and the required context, it can take hours for your developers and SREs to investigate and resolve unexpected issues. Pay-per-seat pricing for on-call and incident management tools makes it cost-prohibitive for all developers to participate in delivering reliable services.We’re on a mission to change that with Lightstep Incident Response. Our goal is to provide a cloud-native reliability platform that enables engineering teams to move fast and innovate boldly. Lightstep Incident Response is a crucial next step on the journey that started with Lightstep Observability. Combining real-time observability with incident resolution, Lightstep now provides teams the capabilities to deliver both innovation and reliability.
Powered by the Now Platform®, Lightstep Incident Response provides developers and SREs context and automation to pinpoint root cause and to streamline incident response workflow across observability, on-call and incident management, and remediation. This helps significantly reduce alert fatigue and decreases the pain of sifting through and resolving context-free alerts—resulting in less downtime, happier customers, and increased productivity.Extending observability across the organizationWith an innovative, usage-based pricing model aligned to the number of active services, customers can fully embrace the “you build it, you run it” culture of service ownership. The whole team can participate in on-call activities, collaborate on critical incidents, and learn from blameless postmortems to build more resilient systems without worrying about exorbitant pricing.The Now Platform has set the gold standard for IT Operations Management and IT Service Management and is used by many IT organizations for enterprise-wide incident management. Lightstep Incident Response integrates with the Now Platform so that distributed DevOps product teams can seamlessly stay connected with platform teams to deliver reliable and resilient services throughout the organization.Find out more about Lightstep Incident Response.1 IDC, US IT Quick Poll Site Reliability Engineering Survey, #US48859422 (February 2022).
IT Business Management becomes Strategic Portfolio Management
In today’s enterprise, technology is quickly extending beyond its birthplace in IT. Solutions that found traction with IT technologists are now helping connect everyone and everything at a company. At LIKE.TG, it starts with our customers.Customers have been using LIKE.TG® IT Workflows products in traditionally non-technology functions. Where these shifts became thematic, we listened and evolved our capabilities to serve those teams. For years, customers have been using our industry-leading IT Business Management (ITBM) products outside of IT. We’ve collaborated with them to ensure our products meet their needs.To better reflect our focus on enabling all organizations to plan, deliver, and track business outcomes across different systems, our ITBM products will now be called Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM).Connecting strategy and deliveryIn this era of constant change, what leading organizations have in common is agility. Agile organizations are better able to thrive in complex environments because they’ve developed the ability to spot business opportunities and threats early and to implement change quickly.LIKE.TG Strategic Portfolio Management can enable your business to move with agility, making the right decisions quickly and confidently to drive customer value faster. The product provides continuous, collaborative, and contextual alignment across every level of your organization.The unified data model and integrated digital workflows of the Now Platform® can deliver the insight you need to connect strategy, delivery, and business outcomes in a constantly changing world. With LIKE.TG SPM, you can ensure all stakeholders and investments are aligned to customer value, no matter what approaches your teams use to deliver work. You can also plan, adapt, and communicate your strategy and track performance in real time.Toward agile business“LIKE.TG’s shift to Strategic Portfolio Management as part of its go-to-market strategy is timely given urgent SPM demand with the challenges of hybrid work, increased complexity, and highly constrained resources,” says Melinda Ballou, research director for IDC’s agile application lifecycle management, quality, and portfolio strategies.“IDC sees SPM generally as a framework to help manage, prioritize, and optimize agile business and technology initiatives and innovation. Coupling process and organizational strategies with automation can enable systemic adoption and must be part of execution. IDC research indicates increasing adoption of agile metrics for businesses, which SPM can also enable.”Find out more about the benefits of Strategic Portfolio Management for your business.
How CIOs can drive innovation and empower transformational work
Today’s CIOs are like sports team coaches. It’s not enough for them just to prepare their teams for games and have a decent winning percentage. They’re expected to orchestrate imaginative plays that will make the most of a team’s talent and win championships.Out-innovating the competitionCIOs are on the hook for a lot more than merely adequate IT infrastructure. They must drive digital innovation for transformational results, enabling organizations to generate new, market-disrupting products and services—and do it faster than ever. They must do more than help their companies compete—they must deliver competitive advantages.“CIOs have a very business value-driven approach to the way they execute their job and speak the language of the business,” says Dan Higgins, global technology consulting leader for EY in a CIO article.“More institutions are putting senior IT executives onto the board as a steering mechanism for the C-suite. That has given the CIO a different voice at that level, but it also raises a different set of shareholder expectations of the role technology has to play in transformation.”Transform or go homeThe 2021 State of the CIO survey from technology industry analyst IDG supports this assertion. Nearly half (47%) of the more than 800 IT and business leaders the firm polled said their CIOs are “transformational.”According to IDG, these CIOs “cultivate enterprise-wide perspective and business knowledge, positioning themselves as trusted partners and strong collaborators with their function counterparts.” Additionally:
28% of CIOs are viewed as business strategists whose perspective extends beyond the walls of the enterprise and whose mission is to drive innovation for the future.
92% of those surveyed see CIOs as more innovation-focused.
89% of survey respondents recognize CIOs as the primary advocates of digital transformation.
Changemaker for the playmakersTo be the changemakers they’re expected to be, CIOs must drive four business imperatives in their organizations. These imperatives represent the fundamentals or foundational strengths and allow their teams to focus on inventive, trailblazing projects that will lead to continuous winning:
Automate and optimize service operations for seamless, always-on technology services that delight end users
Accelerate software transformation by safely fast-tracking advance development and adopting leading-edge architectures and delivery practices
Transform security operations by automating the collaboration of IT, security, and risk teams on data and processes for handling threats quickly and effectively
Decrease costs and risks for software, hardware, and cloud resources by systematically managing the complete technology asset lifecycle
One platform for the winWith LIKE.TG as a partner, CIOs can simplify this foundational IT with a single-platform approach. Watch the video to see a story about today’s expectations of the IT organization and the related challenges.The story recounts life before LIKE.TG and life with LIKE.TG—where IT service operations, software creation, cybersecurity, and IT asset management are streamlined on a single platform so IT teams can focus on transformational work that can deliver huge advantages in the marketplace.
The kind of day you can expect when you use all the power of ITSM
IT workloads and the demands for IT services are increasing in today's digital world as organizations rely more and more on technology services in the hybrid workplace. Among the challenges:
Costly service delivery due to systems and data that aren’t connected
A limited help desk staff that’s overwhelmed by more business-critical incidents and requests than ever, all of which need fast resolution
Subpar service experiences that often result from poor infrastructure visibility, manual processes, and uncoordinated responses
Don’t fret. You can vanquish these obstacles like the fearless and decisive IT leader you are when you get all of the awesomeness in the LIKE.TG® IT Service Management (ITSM) solution, including the power of artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, and analytics.Let’s join one of your peers, Adam, during his workday to witness the real-life value you can achieve when you use the ITSM Professional package and the ITSM Enterprise package.Efficiently handling routine requestsToward the start of his day, Adam checks in with the help desk team that uses the Virtual Agent in ITSM Pro to handle routine requests. About 85% of employees have adopted this self-service method, which deflects a significant number of cases. It also saves users 20 minutes per incident.Now Adam’s team has more time to work on higher-value projects, and they don’t have to answer the same questions repeatedly throughout the day.Consistently delivering high-quality servicesNext, Adam attends a process improvement meeting with his managers to see how Performance Analytics in ITSM Pro provides key data to help his teams proactively maintain excellent service.He learns there’s been a 60% reduction in the time to resolve critical incidents with a decrease in backlog cases by 70%. The team can focus on consistently delivering the best possible results while delighting employees.
Accelerating support for resilient servicesJust before lunch, Adam joins his colleagues from the development team for a DevOps governance review. He’s thrilled that DevOps Change Acceleration in ITSM Pro provides out-of-the-box integrations with development tools and pipelines to automate software changes and approvals.Adam is pleased to discover that both change requests and approvals take less than a minute each, speeding delivery of software his teams need to keep services running 24/7.Deftly handling P1 incidentsRight when Adam returns from lunch, he receives a P1 incident alert. But he’s not worried because Predictive Intelligence that comes with ITSM Pro uses machine learning to quickly identify, prioritize, and route these business-critical issues to the right team for rapid resolution.In fact, there’s been a 66% reduction in incorrectly routed incidents, and 77% of incidents are resolved on the first assignment to a team member. That means Adam’s team can avoid the bottlenecks from manual triage to resolve incidents quickly and use their time on work that drives innovation.Creating efficiencies and cutting costsToward the end of Adam’s workday, he huddles with his direct reports to drill into the survey data records with less-than-stellar customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. They use the Process Optimization app in ITSM Enterprise to see that resolution times for the hardware support team are longer than usual. Adam submits a process improvement initiative in the app to remedy this.This automated analysis process has saved his team four weeks of time this past year, as well as $30,000 on process consultation fees with third parties. Armed with complete visibility into process flows, Adam and his staff can instantly monitor and analyze performance, find conformance issues, and continually improve processes.Saving more than 100 hours a year, per agentFinally, Adam taps Workforce Optimization in ITSM Enterprise to review the performance of his application support team. Real-time coaching has helped the team exceed expectations and reduce training costs by 10%.At the end of his day, Adam is gratified to know the hardware support team members can achieve similar results. The team has reduced the time it takes for monitoring and reporting by 60% this year from this automated resource management.Adam can develop high-performing teams by optimizing schedules, work assignments, and work quality—all in one workspace. See what else happened in Adam’s day and get more details in this infographic.
Harnessing the power of the cloud to create personalized experiences
Technology teams are under more pressure than ever before. They’re balancing the demands of a changing workplace, growing customer expectations, and shifting from traditional to digital delivery. While managing more applications with less visibility, they face expectations to deliver fast, customer-grade experiences.These digital experiences are increasingly enabled by the cloud. Digital customer service interactions are expected to increase by 40% as more customers turn to digital channels and away from in-person services, according to Forrester.At the same time, these technology teams need to be product-focused, meaning they need to speed up the delivery of new products and services where the cloud plays a central role.Many enterprises have made significant strides in adapting and adopting technologies in step with the changing landscape. But there’s more that can be done to transform the world of work. To build seamless and differentiated experiences end to end, teams must adopt operating models that work faster, without sacrificing quality.Putting the cloud to work for youFrom harnessing the full power of your cloud to creating personalized contact center experiences, the right technology is key. With about 50% of all corporate data currently stored in the cloud, according to Statista, it’s clear many have already embraced the cloud. Now, it’s time to make it work for you. LIKE.TG and AWS can help.LIKE.TG provides a single platform to help monitor your cloud end to end—to accelerate application delivery and ensure services are operating at peak performance. With IT Operations Management (ITOM) and DevOps, along with Lightstep Observability and Incident Response, you can bring application resilience and performance to the cloud—identifying and addressing problems before they affect your customers.And, when customers need individualized attention, a personalized solution is just clicks away.Customers have come to expect tailored service that’s almost instantaneous, but it’s not always possible to provide immediate support with increasing call volumes and staffing challenges. LIKE.TG Cloud Call Center for IT Service Management (ITSM) and Customer Service Management (CSM), with native support for Amazon Connect, helps provide a seamless natural language experience. So, customers get the support they need, when they need it.
Why project portfolio management matters for digital transformation
Leaders around the world are moving fast to embrace digital transformation to achieve high performance objectives, including better financial returns, workforce diversity, and environmental stewardship. According to Deloitte, implementing digital technologies can help organizations accelerate progress toward these goals by 22%.What strategies are in place at your organization to ensure successful digital transformation to better compete in the marketplace? It’s not just a matter of money. There’s an element of planning involved with enterprise agility—and a multitude of projects and products in play at any one time.It’s a safe bet that project portfolio management (PPM) has a significant role in:
Improving project visibility
Keeping teams targeting the same goals
Helping teams make better decisions
Achieving project success
With such high stakes, it makes sense as an enterprise decision-maker to improve your understanding of PPM. That way, you can learn what tools are available today to achieve effective PPM outcomes and stay on track with projects to achieve digital transformation goals.Project basicsNo matter your job or industry, at the most basic level, projects refer to the work an organization engages in to change—and enhance—some aspect of how it operates. This could be streamlining internal processes and systems to save money and minimize risk, developing new products and services, or improving ways to market, sell, and support those new products and services.Thousands of business activities can be classified as projects that require various steps, carry high price tags, and need to be managed—hence, the rise of PPM.PPM and managing project resourcesThings change frequently in project work. One critical need is resource management: having the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time. That’s difficult to achieve in a constantly shifting environment. With PPM, you can readily consider:
The resource capacity (the people available) you have for a project
Resource capabilities you have in the people assigned to a project
How resources are being used
Figure 1: Resource managementBenefits of IT business management softwareSpreadsheets don’t cut it if you’re trying to optimize PPM and resource management. This is where implementing an IT business management software solution can deliver significant value.An IT business management solution can help you effectively manage resources, plan the transition from one project to the next, and accurately forecast when resources will be required or released (see Figure 1).It also allows for optimal use of those resources and helps ensure the best possible return on the investment in them. Additionally, the solution can accurately tackle money management and improve project status reporting.Payoffs of PPMProjects exist to deliver enhancements to business operations and to make an organization run better. When projects are managed effectively and efficiently using PPM, your organization can have a higher chance of achieving your goals and objectives and optimizing value—particularly when it comes to digital transformation efforts.Learn more about PPM in our ebook, Project portfolio management 101.
LIKE.TG is again a Magic Quadrant Leader in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
I’m excited to announce LIKE.TG has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools for the second year in a row.This is an extremely important distinction for LIKE.TG and our newly named Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) offering. We believe this recognition reflects our expanded hybrid work management approach, financial management support, and extended integration with third-party tools.Strengths of Strategic Portfolio ManagementBuilt on the Now Platform®, LIKE.TG® SPM integrates strategic operations with development work in a single, unified experience. This unified planning and tracking solution offers a broad set of functionality, including:
Idea management
Prioritization of demands, epics, and features
Product roadmapping
Value stream management
Project and program portfolio management
In addition, SPM supports Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) implementations with epic and feature Kanban boards, product and value stream funding workflows, and remote program increment (PI) planning using a common board view.Agility and visibilityThe rapid pace of business today requires business agility. But many organizations are hampered by standalone tools that don’t communicate with each other. LIKE.TGSPM changes that, enabling organizations to close the gap between strategy and delivery to align the organization.Financial services firm Western Southern implemented LIKE.TG SPM to handle its full program lifecycle and enable better decisions and execution. “We wanted one place to capture, evaluate, prioritize, and execute IT demand, rather than working in silos across our business units,” explains Lisa White, a portfolio analyst at the firm.Centralized visibility has helped Western Southern prioritize demands, maximize business value delivered, and reduce project risks.German-based telecom company T-Systems adopted LIKE.TG SPM to replace its aging project management platform and integrate workflows across the business. Within six months, the platform hosted hundreds of projects and hundreds of users—all with a single view and real-time updates across the company.Continued innovationWe’ll continue to innovate SPM to make it better for organizations around the world and are proud to announce a new quarterly release model to deliver timelier innovative functionality.We’re not surprised by Gartner® recognition based on previous evaluations from other industry analyst firms, including IDC and Forrester Research. We believe these recognitions confirm our solution strategy is on track, rock solid, and working.Find out more about the benefits of Strategic Portfolio Management. Read the full Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ report.
What comes first: ITAM or configuration management?
IT asset management (ITAM) and configuration management are critical for IT modernization initiatives. Although both strategies provide guidance for tracking IT assets, their objectives are quite different.ITAM is about managing IT assets from a cost, risk, and value perspective. Configuration management tracks IT assets from an operational and support perspective.As organizations mature in their service management offerings, one question needs to be addressed: Should ITAM be implemented before configuration management, or should configuration management come first?Before answering this question, it’s important to understand the role of each discipline and how they work together to support service management operations.Managing IT assets from an operational perspectiveConsider the operations of an airline. If you book a flight from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia, you’re given a flight number. That flight number represents a service and is documented in the airline’s database that lists all flights offered.Flight numbers link to relevant information about each flight, including origination, destination, assigned crew members, gate numbers, gate agents, and the airplane itself. Any attributes related to the airplane, such as maintenance records and airplane configuration, are linked directly to the airplane—not to the flight number representing the service.A configuration management solution uses at least one configuration management database (CMDB) to house objects called configuration items (CIs). A CI represents a physical or logical IT element. This means a CI representing a logical element can be used to represent an IT service or a business service, in much the same way as a flight number represents a flight service.A CI that represents a physical entity is linked to hardware or software IT assets and contains attributes associated with configuration and status. A CI representing a service is typically linked to the CI(s) that represents the physical or virtual IT assets that perform the service.
From a mission or business viewpoint, configuration management provides stakeholders with a complete view of the organization’s service offerings and technology assets that support those offerings. From an IT and service management viewpoint, stakeholders are given a complete view of the IT infrastructure that supports service offerings, including representations that show how IT assets and IT services are aligned to the business or mission objectives.Configuration management is aligned with ITSM problem and change management workflows. It plays an important role in root cause analysis, and it minimizes downtime of services offered by an organization.If an IT asset supporting an IT service must be replaced, the CI representing that asset would be replaced, not the CI representing the service, like an equipment change performed by an airline. When an issue is discovered with an airplane, the plane can be replaced without impacting the actual flight number representing the flight service.Managing IT assets from cost, risk, and valueIf an airline decides to expand its services by adding flights to more destinations, decision-makers must evaluate asset inventory to see how many airplanes need to be purchased to meet the new requirements for operations.Although an airplane has an initial cost when purchased, it incurs additional costs while in operation. An inventory asset management database provides stakeholders with the total cost and associated risk of each airplane it has in operation, giving decision-makers data to inform future airplane purchases.Similarly, ITAM tracks IT assets from purchase to disposal—often referred to as IT asset lifecycle management. ITAM practices establish an accurate account of an organization’s IT assets, including the associated cost incurred throughout the IT asset’s lifecycle.ITAM uses an IT asset management database to document physical assets and then links them to associated contractual and financial information. ITAM is not just a software solution; it’s a strategy that requires an organization's internal acquisition and procurement processes to be clearly defined, enforced, and automated.By using workflows that increase control and enforce compliance to an organization’s acquisition policies, ITAM processes can reduce risk and cost. These workflows are typically aligned with ITSM workflows, such as IT asset requests, approvals, procurement, disposals, deployments, and redeployments. Workflows ensure IT assets are documented when they’re purchased and properly tracked when deployed.
ITAM provides stakeholders with asset intelligence by showing how IT assets relate to contracts, departments, cost centers, vendors, warranties, usage, security posture, compliance, availability, and location.Lost or stolen IT assets with sensitive data can result in a reputational nightmare for your company. When integrated with network discovery tools, ITAM solutions can decrease an organization’s security risk, notifying security administrators about unauthorized or unknown IT assets that join the network. Alerts can also be generated if an IT asset doesn’t report into the network for a period of time.ConclusionRolling out ITAM before implementing configuration management could simplify configuration management implementation by providing decision-makers with an accurate account of all the technology in their possession. However, without configuration management in place, the performance and reliability of an organization’s business or mission services is at greater risk. Changes introduced into the environment will most likely result in more downtime.Therefore, the answer to which solution should be first is: Both configuration management and ITAM should be rolled out simultaneously.From a tactical angle, implementing both ITAM and configuration management at the same time enables administrators to use the same discovery tools to capture, upload, and link IT assets to CIs. This allows them to populate both the ITAM database and the CMDB with a single import versus two separate imports.Added benefit: If IT administrators have an accurate inventory of their technology and costs while reviewing IT demands and prioritizing projects, they’ll have data to inform technology acquisition decisions.Configuration and change management workflows that use a CMDB can minimize disruption to the production environment. Both ITAM and configuration management are vital to modernization initiatives, and both should be deployed together.Find out how LIKE.TG CMDB integration into ITAM processes can provide a common place to store and manage data associated with IT assets and CIs.
